16, SHE WINS LITTLE BIG CASE

By VIC ZIEGEL

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Jan 17, 1998 | 12:00 AM

SARAH MULLERVY, SO passionate, so enthusiastic, is rocking on a chair inside the 25th-floor conference room at Proskauer Rose, a law firm that gives 476 attorneys the chance to try again the next day. Sarah is only 16 and so what? She belongs. We're supposed to be talking about her participation in the finals of a citywide moot court competition, her one and only chance to get it right. Wait, we'll get there. Right now we're somewhere in Montana. The topic we're stuck on is an old Errol Flynn movie, the saga of Gen. George Armstrong Custer, "They Died With Their Boots On.

" Definitely not the colorized version. "My friends don't get it," Sarah says. "Black and white is so great.

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" There are two videos of that movie in her Flushing, Queens, home. The one the family watches, don't ask how many times, and the other one, "that my father won't let anybody open the wrapping on," she says. Her father, Joseph, manages a Waldbaum's in Flushing. After supermarket hours, the way his daughter makes it sound, the Mullervys are a family very much involved with the general who lost the big one at Little Bighorn.

That would be 1876. Whenever the family goes on vacation, renting a minivan for two weeks, the idea is to hit historic sites, battlefields, Presidents' homes and museums. "We'd never go to Great Adventure," Sarah says, too fervent to be frumpy. "It had to have a purpose and you'd learn from it. Our favorite is Little Bighorn. We've been there twice.

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" That's her father's idea. The second time, she said, "We got there in time to see the sun coming over the battlefield. My father was almost in tears.

" Sarah says there are two bookcases at home "full of Custer books. My father truly believes he's reincarnated or descended from one of Custer's troops. He's got his own theories about why Custer failed.

" A copy of the Bismarck Dakota Territory Tribune, the first newspaper to print the names of Custer's dead, is framed in their den. Her dad was hoping to find a Mullervy. "I've always been interested in history," she says. "I've always been good at it.

" She thinks she might want to be a historian, or an anthropologist, "and I've always been interested in politics.

" That decision can wait. Sarah, a junior at Francis Lewis High School, takes advanced classes in social studies, physics and history, plays violin in the marching band and is a cashier in her dad's market two days a week. But she still found time to raise her hand she's enthusiastic, remember when a teacher came into her class and asked if anybody wanted to join the school's moot court team, training twice a week after school, with pro bono lawyers from Proskauer Rose. "I didn't know what lawyers did," she admits. "I didn't know how much reading was involved. I thought if you could talk in front of people you could be a lawyer. I didn't know what lawyers looked like besides the show 'Law and Order.

' " She found out. The competition involved 40 high school teams, making mock appeals court arguments on both sides of the same two issues. Sarah defended the constitutionality of a town curfew for minors. The judges were lawyers, law students and professors. "They would interrupt me, badger me, really badger me," she said. "There were no softball questions.

" The team Sarah, Scott Sanford, Teresa Chen and Neha Bhardwaj reached the finals, where it beat Forest Hills High School. Sarah's mother, Pamela, was in the courtroom with a cellular phone. When the appellate court judges made their decision, she called her husband at the supermarket. "He announced it over the store's loudspeaker," Sarah said. Of course he did. It's history.